Who I Am: A Memoir (46 page)

Around midday Lisa Marsh called Nicola to say she had a ‘scoop’ that John was ill. We had heard nothing. Bill then called me. ‘Are you sitting down, Pete? John is dead.’ It feels like a cruel joke. The timing is crazy. I call Roger. He shouts ‘What!’ down the phone, hoping for a moment it is a hoax, then quickly realises I would never play such a joke on him. He sets out to come to the hotel.

Rachel talks me through the first hour. I am in shock. I speak again to Bill. John had been using cocaine and had been with a girl. Later it emerged that she was a pickup and that she had reported his death. I feel horrible based on the fact that I had prayed for some way out of this tour. This was not the price I had in mind.

John has gone. I truly loved him so much. He was the best, oldest, most supportive friend I ever had. He is utterly irreplaceable. Could I have intervened and saved him? Pointless now to speculate. John was an alkie, an addict, and an obsessive compulsive – one more wonderful human being who has gone astray.

I spent the night pacing. Tragically, I now had the best possible reason to turn my back on The Who for ever. But thousands of loyal fans had bought show tickets, and travel tickets, and had paid deposits for hotels. Our fans would understand if we cancelled, but they would all lose hard-earned money. If Bill’s fear was right, our insurers would resist paying out because of the circumstances of John’s death, which meant our crew would never get paid. Their families would suffer.

We had no choice. We simply had to try to make the tour work. I had no idea how we were going to pull it off, but we had to try. I had been ‘born in a trunk’, as the saying goes, into a show-business family, and this was the way I knew how to respond. I was hard-wired to believe that whatever happened, if humanly possible, the show must go on.

Once I’d decided I called Bill. We’d need someone to play bass, and my first choice was Pino Palladino. He had done some solo shows with me, was very quick and wouldn’t be compared to John. He was an equally iconoclastic bass player in his own right, but very different in his approach. Pino flew straight to LA and, as we sat by the pool of the Sunset Marquis, George Clooney, fresh from an evening at the bar, waved his sympathy.

In June 2012 I wrote:

It’s ten years since John’s shocking death in Las Vegas. I have to say that this is not a particularly special time for me because I remember John every day. […] I always felt a strong sense of loving friendship from John, and I think I will cling on to that memory even though Queenie, his late mother, once got angry with me for being angry with John about the way he died and told me that John had never loved me at all. In fact a couple of times John had actually told me he loved me. We were usually alone, and he might have been a bit drunk, but sometimes when we’re drunk we tell the truth. I accept that sometimes we stretch it, so I reserve the right to stretch it and believe that John was not stretching it.

When we speak about loving someone, there is always something unsaid. We love people we do not like. We like people we can never love. We might even marry or go into business with someone we neither like nor love and have a wonderful life or career with them. This is especially true for bands. It isn’t always easy to know what is the truth, and of course – if Queenie is to be believed – feelings between two friends can be intense but not necessarily equal. For me, with John, the situation is clear cut. There are no difficulties, no blurred images. I loved John, I liked him, I respected him, and I miss him. I don’t think he ever put a foot wrong in our relationship. He never said or did anything that I can look back on and fan embers of even the smallest resentment towards him.

On stage with The Who I often look across and expect to see John standing there scratching the side of his nose and taking a resigned deep breath in that characteristically thoughtful way that often presaged a funny story or a blistering bass passage. […]

Some people are utterly without peer. When they are gone they leave an immense vacuum. So it is with John: When he died he left a void that can only be filled with good memories, affectionate recollections, and some healthy and critical review of his occasionally crazy behaviour and extraordinary sense of humour. We met at school, but although we were only twelve years old John was almost a man by then, while I would remain a little boy for many years to come; we’ve all known such friendships in our school days.

I sometimes say that when we met I was eleven years old because that’s how it felt; John was like a fifteen or sixteen year old to me. What is extraordinary is that John took me under his wing so kindly when we first met, and was always a supporter of mine even when I goofed. He was never patronising. I never felt he had to work at it, his support came naturally, and didn’t seem to be a part of any agenda.
*

John’s funeral was in his home town of Stow-on-the-Wold on 10 July during a break in the tour. As the black limousine drove me from the crematorium to the nearby hotel, I felt grateful to be alive. Suddenly the driver pulled the glass division aside.

‘You don’t remember me, do you, Mr Townshend?’

‘I know your face. Have you driven me before?’

‘At the funeral of your father-in-law, Edwin Astley. I gave you an address and you sent an autograph for my father. Thank you for that.’

‘No problem.’ I slumped back into the seat.

‘So are you a Mason as well then?’

‘Pardon?’

‘It’s OK, sir.’ He was reassuring. ‘Mr Entwistle and I were in the same Lodge.’

‘I didn’t know John was a Freemason.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the driver. ‘All his life.’

The Who tour continued in late July 2002 across the East Coast. The enormous noise John used to make on stage was gone for ever. Pino’s sound was smoother and quieter, yet Roger was still struggling to hear himself. Maybe he’d been wrong all along about why he’d had trouble.

At the end of the tour Roger came to say goodbye. He was looking into the future and I think he was worried about what I was thinking.

‘Do you want to do any different stuff next time?’ He was looking anxious, smiling, quite gentle, really.

I obviously didn’t look excited enough.

‘How are you enjoying it?’

‘It’s OK,’ I replied.

Roger’s face fell a little. ‘Just OK?’

‘Yes,’ I tried to make the word sound as positive as I could, ‘OK.’

‘That’s it then?’ He was on the verge of getting irritated with me. ‘Just OK?’

I said I had no complaints. I didn’t elaborate. He knew then that I was not going to continue.

29

BLACK DAYS, WHITE KNIGHTS

My anxiety and concern over the issue of child pornography on the internet had been triggered by that simple online search in 1998 for ways to donate to Russian orphanages. Its impact on me was also, I’m convinced, connected to the panic attacks I had been experiencing for the last few years, and the way it disturbed me was not purely altruistic. It had churned up memories that further convinced me that I myself had been abused.

So with a clear mind and serious mission, back in May and June 1999 I had set aside some time to look again at the internet and the issue of child pornography. Since my shocking exposure to it the previous year things didn’t seem to have got any worse, but neither had anything improved. According to the broadsheets, police and new protection agencies were doing good work tracking down end-users, but nothing much could be done to prevent children being exploited at the source in foreign countries. In a financial chain that ran unimpeded from the Russian mob all the way to our high-street banks, big profits were being made by doing terrible things to children. For the tabloid press it was a good story. For most normal folk it was an issue no one even wanted to think about.

My plan was to run a story on my website illustrating that online banks, browser companies and big-time pornographers were all complicit in taking money for indecent imagery of children. I used my Barclaycard once on a site with a button that (rather ridiculously) said ‘Click here for child-porn.’ The charge was $7, which I immediately cancelled, not wanting even this small charge to benefit banks and credit-card companies that allowed the transaction in the first place.

I also selected a site I was certain was a sting – in that way I wouldn’t be passing money to criminals – and kept a careful record of the transaction. (I had a colleague in Boston who did what I did, so we could support each other. He told me which sites were most likely to have been taken over by the FBI or US Postal Service.)

The point was to show that a bank was taking my money. I would use my personal website to publish a long essay, and eventually a small book, on the dark side of the fast-evolving internet. I felt I was an expert, I had seen it all coming in
Lifehouse
, and I was prepared to speak about the unspeakable – child pornography – from the position of someone who had suffered abuse and knew how deep the scars could be.

Recently there had been talk that the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, planned to change the law retrospectively to ensnare anyone who had ever searched for child pornography on the internet. I guessed that might include me, but several years had passed. I had put it almost to the back of my mind, and although I’d published an essay on the internet I hadn’t done anything about a book or newspaper article. Even so, I wasn’t concerned, not at first.

I now had three close friends in my group-counselling sessions who had suffered much more explicit sexual abuse than I had, or remembered it more clearly.

Alice was worried that images of her own abuse – as an eight-year-old she had been photographed by her abuser – may have found their way onto the internet. When her own daughter turned eight she started to get extreme anxiety attacks.

Robin had flipped when his life had suddenly come good, with a lovely new partner, a new baby and a happy life. He couldn’t handle it. Like me, when he tried to speak about what had happened to him as a child he went into a panic.

Jenny, a middle-aged actress, was the last of the three, her story the most disturbing of all. She had been ritually abused by her own father in a religious order beginning when she was a baby. The more she talked about it, the worse she felt. I planned to concentrate on raising money to create a new kind of practical, sympathetic, no-shame therapeutic care for adult survivors of sexual abuse.

I helped set up a research programme for a new support system for survivors of childhood abuse with therapists at The Priory and Broadreach. A telephone helpline as a starting point for such people could be more useful than all the moralising that had started to kick off in the newspapers. The first three subjects were Robin, Alice and Jenny (not their real names), all of whom had cried out for some kind of help facing their demons.

On 29 January 2000 I got a phone call. Our first subject, Robin, the young man I had put into treatment, had completed his two months of expensive rehabilitation, gone home to his loving family and his new baby, grabbed some money, travelled to Manchester, checked into a crack den and overdosed. He was dead. He had phoned me a number of times while in treatment, having taken issue with the way he was being dealt with, and felt I was wasting my money. He had reached out for help and I had been able to finance treatment, but now it felt like all we’d done was to inadvertently fast-track his death.

Ironically, despite the fact that Double-O, the charity I’d established, had paid for Robin’s treatment at Broadreach, they would (correctly) not release his case files, which would have been helpful in trying to understand what had happened. Luckily, John Fugler, a friend of mine who ran Closereach, the long-term secondary rehab unit at Broadreach, suggested that maybe what Robin had come face to face with in his recent therapy had been too much for him to bear.

Badly shaken, I still hoped to complete the trial with the two remaining subjects. Rachel had met Jenny and knew her awful story, and that I had offered her a stint with a senior therapist at The Priory when she was ready. One day Rachel returned from having spent some time with Jenny, who was very upset. Jenny’s father (her abuser) had remarried, and his young wife was pregnant, expecting a daughter.

At 45 Jenny was behaving like an infant, projecting fearfully that her father would do to his new baby daughter what he had done to her. Jenny eventually went into The Priory in December. When the time came for her to leave she collapsed, overwhelmed by intense panic. With the therapist’s guidance I extended her period of treatment. This was no small matter: it cost £75,000 in all, enough to run a small charity for several years.

Jenny committed suicide on 7 January 2002. It was heartbreaking, and sobering. All I had proved was what I already knew: the impact of sexual abuse on children, especially infants, needed far more attention, and opening up the past was potentially life-threatening.

There was now only one subject of my Survivors project left – Alice, who had done a stint at The Priory too. I am happy to say that she is alive and well and doing OK, and has now been sober for two years.

I posted ‘A Different Bomb’ on my website on 17 January 2002. The essay related Robin, Alice and Jenny’s stories to the issue of child pornography on the internet. I still wanted to write a book about this – or publish a long essay online – so it was a minor shock to my rock-star ego to discover that a very sober and effective book already existed.

Beyond Tolerance
, by Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, had been published in 2001, although I didn’t find it until the time of Jenny’s suicide. He had written everything that needed to be said. Jenkins had done the good work I had hoped to do myself.

In spite of press interest, including an offer from the
Guardian
to publish ‘A Different Bomb’, I began to see that back in May 1999 I had made a bad mistake: according to Jenkins, ‘it is not necessary for a prosecutor to show that an accused individual knew that pressing a link would produce a suspect image’, so I had placed myself in danger of prosecution by admitting to having pressed a link. The fact that I had not looked at any images, only at the home page of a website, might be immaterial from a legal point of view.

I suffered from ‘White Knight Syndrome’ writ large.
*

There had been an extraordinary ramification to John’s death. When Roger and I agreed to continue the tour, neither of us had imagined that John’s share of the tour proceeds would be ours. We imagined there would be huge costs and damages associated with the cancellation of various shows, and that John’s estate (his family) would remain entitled to a large payment. But Roger and I did benefit financially from John’s death, and substantially.

For me, this promised to be a huge blessing. I was still committed to raising awareness of the way internet child pornography could indirectly lead to the premature deaths of particularly vulnerable individuals like Robin and Jenny. Salacious newspaper stories about paedophiles sold well, but greatly disturbed and triggered the adult survivors of abuse endured during childhood. I had found two organisations I felt might do better work than Double-O had managed. One was the NSPCC, to whom I’d made a number of donations in the past (Rachel had noticed their STOP IT NOW! campaign). The other was NAPAC, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, which specifically focused where I felt work most needed to be done, and were planning to offer a telephone helpline. A friend of mine (an advocate for Alice in her triumph against her abuser in Ireland) was on the steering committee of trustees.

Early on the morning of Saturday 11 January 2003 Nick Goderson, who was now in charge of my business affairs, called to say that according to the front page of the
Daily Mail
a nameless millionaire rock-star guitarist was in the list of names sent to Operation Ore – a computer-crime investigation focusing on child pornography. The FBI had given Operation Ore 7,000 names of British people who had visited sites that had been infiltrated.

‘That’ll be me then,’ I said.